The other night while we were partying, the subject came up as to why the alphabet is in the a,b,c, etc. order. We tried to solve this by using the Greek, and Roman alphabets that proceeded ours, but as you probably already know, z (zeta)comes after f and the last letter is o (omega).
Anyone know how our English alphabet got into the order we know it by? Thanks!

'The Roman [alphabet] is derived from the Greek, perhaps by way of Etruria, and the Greeks had imitated the Phoenician alphabet. The exact steps are unknown, but the Phoenician, Hebrew, Arabic, and Devanagari systems are based ultimately on signs of the Egyptian hieroglyphic writing. This writing was not alphabetic, but in the phonogram it bore the germ of phonemic writing; thus the sign “bear” might (to use an English analogy) mean also the sound b, and “dog” d. A similar development created the Persian cuneiform syllabary...

...It is not always clear what constitutes a distinct alphabet. French uses the same basic alphabet as English, but many of the letters can carry diacritic and other marks (for example, é, à or ô). In French, these marks are not considered to create additional letters. However, in Icelandic, the accented letters (such as á, í and ö) are considered distinct letters of the alphabet. Some adaptations of the Latin alphabet are augmented with ligatures, such as æ in Old English and Ȣ in Algonquian; by borrowings from other alphabets, such as the thorn þ in Old English and Icelandic, which came from the Futhark runes; and by modifying existing letters, such as the eth ð of Old English and Icelandic, which came from d. Other alphabets only use a subset of the Latin alphabet, such as Hawaiian, or Italian, which only uses the letters k, x, and w for foreign words.' www.answers.com

So, like others, we based our alphabet on the Roman, but muddled it up by adding and dropping letters - because we didn't speak Latin, and needed some extra sounds, but didn't need all the Latin ones.

Thanks, NNN, that clears some of the mystery up; guess we'd have to be here thousands of years ago for the whole picture.

You're welcome. You must have some pretty wild parties there.

This discussion came up long before we all started to look like "10's". You know, 10 at 2, and 2 at 10.

Geeze Kelleygirl! It's obvious! The letters are in that order because it's the easiest to sing to the tune of "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star".

Can't have a party without the music!

LOL, Rakuchild! Someone actually came up with that at the party. But we tried singing K, J, P, R, M, U, L -- it still sounded just fine.

I think that they cheated and looked in a dictionary. How else could they get all 25, er, 26 right?

I hate to be too literal, but the term "alphabet" was derived from 'alpha...beta', the first two 'letters' of the Greek alphabet, right? So our modern alphabet was at least addressing that society. We don't say heiroglypic-bet do we? No offense Egypt, but it takes too long.

"Eyeball, bird, bird, fish thing, pyramid. Dogfaced human, wavy lines, eyeball, bird."

roughly translated - "Kilroy was here"

Ooo wait, I know. I before E except after C, no wait...nevermind.